Fiction in the Age of the Phone
Why no one reads fiction on their phone and what fiction writers can do about it
When was the last time you lost yourself in a novel on your phone? Now, ask yourself how many nonfiction articles you’ve consumed on your phone in the previous week alone? My answer to the first question is “never,” and my answer to the second is—well, I don’t keep track of what I read online, but my Matter queue currently lists 107 items, every single one of them a nonfiction article.
I’ve been asking these questions because I write a lot of fiction, and lately, I’ve been trying to think of interesting ways to distribute my writing online.
But when I think back on my own reading habits, I realize two things that are quite damning to my own desires to publish fiction online:
I rarely read fiction on my phone (or my computer, for that matter)
I rarely read contemporary fiction
It’s not just me. The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) found that the percentage of people reading books has been declining overall, but they report a sharper drop in fiction reading (from 45.2% of respondents in 2012 to 37.6% in 2022, the lowest share on record). This represents a 17% rate of decline in fiction reading in a decade. The rate of decline is even more stark when you look at “literary” fiction (novels, short stories, poetry, and plays), where the rate of decline has accelerated from -5% to -14% since 1992. The decline in reading correlates with increased participation in online media.
While overall reading is declining, print books consumption remains somewhat steady. According to the Pew Research Center, print books remain more popular than e-books: 65% of adults report reading a print book in the last year, compared to 30% who read an e-book. When you look at fiction, and particularly the “General & Literary Fiction” category, you see a strong dominance in print books over other formats in the Nielsen BookScan data.
Looking at web reading habits, apps like Pocket, Instapaper, Matter, and Readwise are primarily used for saving web articles, email newsletters, RSS feeds, X-threads, PDFs, and EPUBs, formats that have a strong focus on non-fiction content. Their emphasis on features like highlighting, note-taking, and resurfacing important information further indicate a focus on information retention, more typical of non-fiction reading.
Efforts by various publishers to create fiction-centric online reading experiences have largely failed. In October, Amazon announced the closure of its serialized fiction platform, Kindle Vella. Authors have noted that while the internet has made “serialized storytelling surprisingly easy,” only a handful of niche genres have seen success, and success in that format requires significant engagement with readers.
The newsletter, on the other hand, has been enjoying a recent boom, buoyed on the backs of Substack and its hefty VC fundraising. But on Substack, the most popular newsletters, and those raking in the most earnings, are all nonfiction-focused. Advice on how to build a six-figure newsletter on Substack calls out a need to “solve specific problems,” which, while not explicitly stated, points to nonfiction content as the answer.
That data paints a compelling picture, and one that rings true with my own experience: readers vastly prefer to read fiction in print form (or, on an e-book designed to mimic the print experience closely), and when readers read online,—particularly on their phones—they gravitate to nonfiction.
There’s something easy, almost seductive, about reading an article on your phone. You can gobble it up, piece-meal, if needed, in the little gaps you find in your busy day: in the five minutes between Zoom meetings at work, in line waiting for a coffee, in those brief, beautiful moments when your toddler plays independently. The trending news story that you doomscroll in bed.
This type of reading works for contemporary nonfiction—it even enhances the experience. I feel enmeshed, even trapped, in the vicissitudes of life, grappling with limited time and abundant demands on my attention, and I get the sense that the nonfiction writer is, too. They, too, must grapple with the confusing, disorienting world we find ourselves in, among the supersensorium of options at our disposal. They, too, are distracted, pulled in a million directions. They, too, don’t have a clue about what is happening, but they have a lot of ideas. They have a lot of sources, a bevy of examples. Reading nonfiction on your phone is like skimming a little fractal piece of the entire web. Quick, punchy paragraphs of ideas barely stitched together, liberally sprinkled with hyperlinks to other quick, punchy pieces full of ideas. The work is digressive, citatory, skimmable, and shallow. Perfect for your information-addled brain.
Fiction, on the other hand, feels like a luxury. Both to write and to read. But why is that?
It’s because we live in the internet age. In the age of the phone. The age of the web. And the web is a form, a literary form, and it has a grammar: the hyperlink.
The Hyperlink State
In a 2009 Ribbonfarm post, Venkatesh Rao puts forward the idea that the hyperlink is not just a fancy way to cite sources online but constitutes an entirely new form of grammar, one native to online writing. “The web is a regular medium whose language is the hyperlink.”
A writer who skillfully uses hyperlinks can create new effects that are only possible through stitching together multiple sources in the course of writing a sentence. It transforms the reader-writer relationship by ceding more agency to the reader. They decide what and when to click and may, in fact, never finish your piece because they’ve left it behind, disappearing down a rabbit hole of interesting clicks. The hyperlink makes the reader, as Rao says, “an extraordinarily active meaning-constructor” in online writing.
Naturally, by giving more agency to the reader, it may feel like diminishing the agency of the writer. Why, indeed, would you encourage your readers to click away from your work? And, in fact, over the last ten years or so, we have seen a deliberate reduction in this kind of online generosity, with the rise of cozyweb-driven screenshot content and virtually all social media networks now burying links on their platforms.
Indeed, Rao recently updated his understanding of hyperlink grammar in the context of a retreat from the “worldwide” web—a stage where anyone and everyone can play a part in full view of all participant-spectators—to a new dark forest web. As Rao says, “The view of hypertext culture I shared 15 years ago in The Rhetoric of the Hyperlink, which was quite popular at the time, now seems hopelessly idealistic.” Rao positions the decline of the hyperlink as largely a result of the decline of an open web to one filled increasingly with closed-off platforms where the owners benefit from keeping all the eyeballs locked in their particular digital theme park. A reduced commons reduces the hyperlink.
But the hyperlink remains the grammar of the web, and it declines alongside the web. I’ll leave thoughts on cozyweb and hyperlink-reduced enshittification for another day.
What I want to focus on is fiction writing and why it never managed to embrace the hyperlink style of web writing that brought boomtown growth to non-fiction writing, fueling first a blogging renaissance and now a newsletter one.
The Dream State
It’s because fiction produces an entirely different mind state to nonfiction writing—and therefore requires a different grammar. While nonfiction flourishes with the hyperlink, fiction is destroyed by it.
In The Art of Fiction, John Gardner likens the reading—and writing—of fiction to a dream. “Fiction does its work by creating a dream in the reader’s mind.” Like dreams, fictional worlds constitute their own logic, and they entice the reader to enter that world. No matter how outlandish or fantastical it may seem, the world is consistent. When you dream, you accept what is happening, no matter how nonsensical the events may be. It is only after you awaken that you realize: that was ridiculous. Fiction works in the same way.
This is not easy to do. For fiction to be effective, it must be, as Gardner points out, “vivid and continuous.” Vivid in the sense that the reader must be able to “see” what is happening with their mind’s eye, and continuous “because a repeatedly interrupted flow of action must necessarily have less force than an action directly carried through from its beginning to its conclusion.” Interruptions destabilize the dream state.
You can see how the hyperlink is a problem.
When writing fiction online, hyperlinks break the spell. Dissolve the dreamworld. The fiction writer is like a magician who must carefully stage manage the performance. She must, necessarily, “hog the stage,” for to allow spontaneous audience participation would risk ruining the effect. In both fiction and magic shows, a prerequisite to enjoying the act is a suspension of disbelief. You know what you are “seeing” is not real, and although there is a strong desire to locate where the wires are placed, you also understand that knowledge of that sort will destroy the appeal. You want to be transported, mesmerized. You want to believe. It’s why you are there in the first place.
Two forms of writing, two forms of reading
In this framing, we have two distinct forms of writing: the nonfictive and the fictive, the hyperlink and the dream. It is not the same experience to read each genre of writing, nor is it the same experience to write in either mode.
When I write nonfiction, I write like I read the web: all over the place. I bounce around from paragraph to paragraph. I write, in one moment, the conclusion, then something in the middle, then circle back to the opening. I think of something new to write and make a note of it. I transplant entire paragraphs from my notes into the middle of the article in progress. I write out of order. I write and then stop to research something online and read for fifteen minutes, an hour. It doesn’t matter if I lose track. All the words are there, a pastiche of words tossed at a white screen. I am writing this article right now, and at the bottom of my page is a “notes” section with 300 words of half-baked writing that I may or may not paste into the article later.
But when I write fiction, I must go in order—slowly and carefully. I have a precise sequence of activities that I do every time before I sit down to write fiction. I must put myself in a trance because the story is a dream, and I must let it unfold as I write it. I hook my unconscious, dreaming mind to my pen. I do not know what will happen in my story until it happens. When I write fiction, I must close down all my apps. Sometimes, even the outside world is a distraction, and the blinds must be closed. I write many first drafts by hand, but when I use the computer, I use a plugin that hides everything I’ve written as I go. When I write fiction, there is only ever the word I am working on, in that moment, one at a time.
If I am interrupted when writing nonfiction, it’s no big deal. I’m writing this right now with my three-year-old in the same room. Interruptions are even helpful! I can get pulled out of a bunny trail and sent back to the main path. Or, a new thought might intrude that sends the piece down an interesting avenue.
But I loathe interruptions when writing fiction. I’m not to be disturbed. Otherwise, the spell may break.
So, too, with reading. As I wrote earlier, I find the experience of reading nonfiction online quite pleasant. I enjoy having a constant queue of articles that I can explore at my leisure whenever I have a moment. But when I read fiction, I prefer a physical book and a span of uninterrupted time (with my laptop closed and my phone on “do not disturb”). Usually, I read for an hour before bed, and this is almost exclusively when I read fiction.
Separating the two forms of textual creation and consumption helps to answer a host of tedious questions about reading and writing. Are physical books superior to e-books? Are we losing our ability to focus? Why can’t the kids read anymore?
These kinds of questions can (mostly) be dismissed as noise. The apparent debate is only a confusion of terms. Fiction and non-fiction are almost different mediums, with their own internal logics, their own grammatical forms, and their ideal platforms and methods of creation plus consumption. Physical books are better for fiction, but e-books have significant advantages for non-fiction (access to the hyperlinked web and the ability to export highlights and notes). Realizing this, I now consciously consume fiction in print form and nonfiction on my phone or Kindle (it works out quite nicely). No, we are not losing our ability to focus. What appears to be a bug of the internet (distracted skimming) is actually a feature, a feature of the hyperlinked web. Fiction book sales are actually increasing, and it’s not uncommon to see a young person today with a stack of physical books (all BookTok approved, of course), devouring them one after the other. It’s just that once they’ve put the book down, they’re back on the phone, skimming the supersensorium for fresh ideas.
New ways to write—and read—fiction
While perhaps I understand the terrain a bit better, I’m still left with a burning question: What is the future of fiction?
The answer might be simple: the same as it’s ever been. If you are interested in writing fiction, you write print books that readers can hold in their hands and place on their bookshelves to be used as TikTok backgrounds.
But this is unsatisfying for various reasons. The web has transformed our world, unlocking new forms of expression, new mediums, new economies of scale, and new opportunities for readers and writers. Non-fiction is having a renaissance of sorts. Why can’t fiction get in on that?
Is it possible for fiction writers to have their cake and eat it, too? Is it possible to maintain the vivid, continuous dream-space necessary for good fiction in an online context?
I’ll speculate two different ways of approaching the problem (neither of them particularly new; but then again, email was hardly new when Substack kicked off the newsletter resurgence). My proposed solutions must satisfy two criteria:
The medium preserves the fictive dreamscape
The medium taps into the network effects and economies of scale afforded by the hyperlinked web
As I’ve hopefully established, these two criteria seem, at first glance, opposed. But I think there are ways to thread the needle. Third ways that do a little bit of both.
My first proposed medium is the physical-digital hybrid (released through a platform like Metalabel), and the second is the hyperlink novel (utilizing platforms like Roam or Obsidian).
Neither of these ideas are particularly revolutionary, but they do feel under-utilized. I’d like to see more fiction writers try experiments in these directions (and I plan to do the same in the future).
Physical-Digital Hybrids
One of the benefits of writing online is the speed of distribution. You can write something, post it, and immediately, it’s off to the races, zooming about online at the speed of clicks, picking up readers with increasing (sometimes viral) velocity. There’s something very satisfying about this as a writer. You can share thoughts instantly when they’re ready—and shape the zeitgeist of other thinking around you. It can quite literally feel like a conversation, combining the long-term durability of writing with the immediacy of speech.
This is different from the normal experience of publishing print books. The process is often long (it can take years for a written book to get physically created and distributed) and requires maneuvering through a complicated web of gatekeepers.
In my piece, Curation Economy, Not Creator Economy, I wondered if there was a way to “have it both ways” vis-a-vis self-publishing and traditional publishing. This tension is heightened with fiction writing since, as I’ve demonstrated, the options for growing online are limited by the form.
One way to “have it both ways” is by releasing both physical and digital versions of your work. A good example of this approach is Metalabel, a platform for releasing creative work online. Metalabel is a web platform that takes advantage of online creation and distribution mechanisms, namely reach, virality, and collaboration, while also combining some of the benefits of physical releases—by packaging your work as a “collectible.”
Metalabel embraces the ethos of self-publication. A “do it yourself” approach inspired by punk bands. As they write on their website, “Rather than wait for someone else to legitimize them, these bands legitimized themselves by starting their own labels, putting themselves out, and ultimately making scenes and something bigger than just them on their own.” Metalabel focuses on creative collaboration and scene-making, which shifts the focus from the individual (which is the emphasis of the creator economy) to a group of artists—to a scene.
One of the exciting things about Metalabel is that you can release physical versions of your work (in addition to digital versions). This is a powerful ability for fiction writers, as it allows them to collaborate easily with other artists, build scenes around their work, use the web for marketing and distribution—building a fandom anywhere—while releasing their work in the medium it most wants to be consumed: as a physical artifact. In this approach, you take what’s good about the web for fiction (collaboration, reach, new forms of monetization) and side-step the problems (that no one wants to read fiction online).
I plan to experiment with this approach in the coming years. One way I’m thinking about doing it:
Put together fiction mini-zines (say, 3-5 stories) knitted together by a theme, character, or plot.
Use social media and email to gather interested potential readers
Offer the physical mini-zine to that audience for a small fee
Set up a simple website (digital garden) for archiving the stories online—while offering an easy way for readers to collect the printed version
This kind of release pattern also makes it easier to focus on depth over frequency. Most traditional short story collections contain about 10 stories, which can take a couple of years to write. A single story is much easier to complete, but it disappears online. It’s not quite right to treat it as a “post,” and yet it’s too little for the heft of a “book.” A three-story mini-zine might be an interesting sweet spot. You could release them much faster than a traditional book (perhaps once a quarter or twice a year), but you’re also not locked into the unrealistic cadence established by non-fiction newsletters (once per week). This approach not only aligns well with the pace of fiction writing but it also allows for a more curated, collectible approach to sharing work.
Most importantly, however, is that it allows readers to consume fiction in the best way: as a physical object and in a concentrated release that encourages focused consumption (which is necessary for sustaining the fictive dream). As opposed to the incessant drip-drip of newsletter posts trapped in the perennial now.
Hyperlink Fiction
The second interesting form that I want to explore is the hyperlink novel. Rather than try and sidestep the hyperlink, the “grammar of the web,” hypertext fiction offers a way for fiction writers to use this grammar to build fiction.
Hyperlink fiction is hardly new and has been around for almost as long as the hyperlinked web. Michael Joyce’s “afternoon, a story” (1987) is widely considered the first significant hypertext fiction, following a narrator investigating whether he witnessed his son’s death in a car accident. Shelley Jackson’s “Patchwork Girl” (1995) reimagines Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein through a feminist lens, using the fragmented structure of the hypertext to mirror its protagonist’s assembled body. These early works demonstrated hypertext’s potential to create nonlinear narratives where readers could choose their own paths through the story. However, many of these early experiments failed to gain mainstream traction, partly because they often embraced fragmentation and disorientation as core aesthetic principles—directly undermining the “vivid and continuous” dream state that effective fiction requires. These hypertext experiments embraced the hyperlink’s tendency to rupture narrative coherence, but what I want to explore is the possibility of repurposing the hyperlink, not as a distractive, dream-dissolving element, but as a foundational feature in fiction.
There’s a fictional genre that may be poised to not only avoid the pitfalls of the hyperlink but utilize it for new narrative purposes: the fantasy novel. More specifically, the fantasy series. More than any other genre (save perhaps science fiction), fantasy embraces the fiction-as-a-world conceit. The world is the book, and the book is the world. This conceptualization offers an intriguing possibility for the hyperlink as a world-building tool. Almost every fantasy novel includes some type of supplementary content: maps in the front-matter, appendices in the back-matter (full of family trees, fictional histories, annals of long-dead rulers, mythologies and lore, supplementary stories and poems, and so forth). These supplementary materials are necessary for building out the broader context of the fictional world, making it feel like a real place with history, commerce, geography, and religion.
However, front matter and back matter are elements of printed books, and a digital book could do something very different with this material: it could sprinkle it throughout the story in the form of hyperlinks. Whenever a location is mentioned in the story, include a hyperlink to the map; family names link to lineage trees; gods to a Wiki-like description of the lore.
The benefit for the writer is that you would not have to overexplain your world as you’re inviting your reader to experience it for the first time. We’ve all read bad fantasy bogged down by characters constantly pausing the action to explain the mechanics of magic or pontificate on the historical details of the surrounding countryside. The fiction writer can include all this and keep the action going by using hyperlinks. Because some degree of explanation is necessary in fantasy. The world they are building is a new one, unfamiliar to the reader. Fantasy writers have solved this conundrum largely by deploying variations on the fish out of water trope. Choose a main character who is also unfamiliar with the fantasy world and let them ask questions of the characters around them. There are several ways to do this:
The character enters the fantasy world from our own (the Pevensie children in The Chronicles of Narnia (1950), Lessingham in The Worm Ouroboros (1922), Alice in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865)).
The character comes from a parochial backwater or is otherwise unfamiliar with their new surroundings (Frodo Baggins in The Lord of the Rings (1954), Paul Atreides in Dune (1965), Luke Skywalker in Star Wars (1977)).
The character is a young (sheltered) child with limited personal experience (Bran Stark in A Song of Ice and Fire (1996), Lyra Balacqua in His Dark Materials (1995)).
The best example of this trope is Harry Potter, who manages to satisfy all three examples at the same time (he’s a small child locked in a parochial state by cartoonishly villainous relatives who enters the magical world from our own). Despite being a folk hero in the wizarding world, Harry Potter knows absolutely nothing about it and, therefore, spends all seven books asking pedantic questions about the world that he will save. The effect is particularly obvious here because J.K. Rowling (somewhat foolishly) introduced another major character who was not born into the magical world: Hermione Granger. Hermione, however, is a walking encyclopedia, and is usually the one explaining things to Harry, even though, she too, should be a fish out of water; but she’s so good at expounding the workings of the magical world that she often explains things to children who were born into that world (like Ron Weasley). The in-universe explanation for this is that Hermione reads a lot, which only begs the question of why Harry never bothers to educate himself (or why, after a few years at Hogwarts, his knowledge does not meaningfully grow).
Rowling deliberately structured her story in this way so that she can (via characters like Hermione) explain the world she is building to the audience as she builds it. It works (for a children’s story), but it severely undermines character building because, despite being told that he’s a competent leader who inspires others, Harry Potter seems to the reader a lucky fool who never has any idea what is going on.
Now, imagine a Harry Potter written with hyperlinks. Freed from the trope of “main character who does not understand the fantasy world,” Harry can grow up in a wizarding family which makes him more interesting because his characterization as a competent wizard is believable and his psychological grappling with his status as the “chosen hero” becomes more compelling because it was something he grew up believing in since birth. He can be a flawed hero. An interesting hero because he can be meaningfully seduced by the allure of Slytherin House and all it represents. Hermione’s character, too, improves because she can remain the outsider who doesn’t understand the world but makes up for it with a surfeit of cleverness and book learning. This Hermione would be far less annoying, less didactic and self-satisfying, and would come across instead as a plucky underdog.
Hiding the details of world-building behind hyperlinks creates multiple levels to read a fantasy story. You could read through without clicking the hyperlinks, which would make the world feel alien, surreal, overwhelming, and alive. Since the writer can hide the explanatory prose behind the hyperlinks, what’s left would be a story full of strange, disorienting scenes with blood-and-flesh action. Some fantasy books have been written in this way: Gene Wolfe’s The Book of the New Sun (1980) and Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast (1946) come to mind, stories where the characters all come from the same strange world and therefore assume familiarity with it, creating a disorienting effect for the reader.
But a hyperlink fantasy would introduce a second reading, where you click the hyperlinks to understand the context of the world, creating a similar effect to reading a traditional fantasy novel today but without the awkward fish-out-of-water trope—freeing the author to explore more interesting main characters.
But you could also introduce a third reading by including hyperlinks within the hyperlinks that rabbit hole to deeper streams. Stories within the story. Imagine the entire online Wiki of a fantasy world included in the main text via two and three-layer hyperlink clicks.
Here’s an example of what I mean, from Harry Turtledove’s Into the Darkness (I haven’t personally read this novel, but I found this illustrative example via Reddit). Here’s a sentence early in the novel that’s bogged down by world-building.
His mother looked at him as if he’d suddenly started speaking the language of the Lagoans, whose island kingdom lay beyond the isles of Sibiu, far southeast of Forthweg.
The additional clause after Lagoan, while explaining what that word means, does little to advance the scene; in fact, it pulls the reader out of the immediacy of the moment, away from the mother’s look, which should be the focus.
Now, rewrite the scene with the benefit of hyperlinks:
His mother looked at him as if he’d suddenly started speaking Lagoan.
The word “Lagoan” would be a hypertext link to a brief history of the Lagoans: “The Lagoans come from Lagoas, an island kingdom that lay beyond the isles of Sibiu, far southeast of Forthweg.”
In this approach, Turtledove could maintain the immediacy of his scene while still providing the necessary world-building context. He could have his cake and eat it, too.
This method of composing stories—nested dolls of stories within stories—invites the reader into a world that feels large and continuously larger. The author can flesh out the details of their world as it comes to them, adding additional layers of context over time. Imagine reading A Song of Ice and Fire as an online hypertext, with rich linking to the various maps and appendices, plus all the online supplementary material (the unofficial Wiki, George R. R. Martin’s “Not a Blog”), the companion novels (Dunk & Egg, Fire and Blood, The World of Ice and Fire), and, hell, why not, even the HBO television shows—multiple media all coexisting in a single “space.”
There are literary precursors to this type of metafiction: David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (1996), Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire (1962), and Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2000) come to mind. In these novels, multiple narratives co-exist in the physical space of the book, converging and “talking” to one another through the use of citations and footnotes. Adapting this storytelling approach to the web would yield similarly interesting results. It was a much better experience reading Infinite Jest on the Kindle compared to the print book. I could click on the notes (as hyperlinks), which saved me the obnoxious and exhausting act of flipping that big book back and forth. It was much smoother to click through and lose myself in the maze of footnotes. It’s one of those rare fiction books that’s better in a digital form than in print. The dreamworld of that story is one built on hyperlink-adjacent content (the academic footnote).
A great contemporary example is David Chapman’s book, Meaningness, which exists as an online, hyperlinked novel. Even today, you can see that Chapman has included links to pages that he has not yet written, inviting the reader into the book as he writes it. He has pre-emptively linked to those pages, showing the additional context to come and offering a promise of what is to come. Chapman also uses hyperlinks to define the terms he uses (like “eternalism,” “nihilism,” “materialism,” etc.), which is extremely helpful in a philosophical text. Like a web forum, the pages of his “book” also include comments. Readers can ask questions or clarifications directly in the text and Chapman often responds, further elucidating his writing. These comments extend the (seemingly infinite) boundaries of the text, which, in turn, reflect on one of the book’s central theses: that meaning is both infinite and discrete.
Though a non-fiction text, Chapman’s book demonstrates the potency of the hyperlinked book and opens new options for fiction writers. You could create your own hypertext novel fairly easily with platforms like Roam Research and Obsidian. Obsidian, in fact, offers an easy way to publish your notes as simple web pages. An author could start by writing chapters in Obsidian, adding hyperlinks to anything interesting or concepts they plan to flesh out later. Then, at a set schedule (say, once a week), they could publish their notes online. An RSS feed could be set to notify readers when new pages are published.
This approach seems more interesting to me than serialized novels (on newsletter platforms like Substack) because it opens multiple directions to take a story, rather than the linear style afforded by a weekly newsletter—which feels no different than a traditional novel, albeit one arbitrarily cut up and delivered piecemeal. The hyperlink novel, on the other hand, offers an entirely new way to write and read fiction.
The reason this approach could work for fiction (and not dismantle the fictive dream) is because it would remain a contained world; every hyperlink would point to something else within the same fictive space. You build not within the structure of the entire web (which dissolves the work, like pouring a glass of orange juice into the ocean), but instead, you recreate the novel following the structure of the web. A world entirely of its own. An ocean of orange juice.
Novels are already miniature, self-contained worlds. While non-fiction writers try to understand the world by studying bits and pieces of it (often in great detail), the fiction writer tries to understand the world by recreating it. The novel is a synecdoche—the fictional world a stand-in for the entire world. The hyperlink novel, therefore, is a synecdoche of the web rather than a part of it. Writing hyperlinked fiction may offer us a better way to understand what it is like to live in our time, when more and more of our lives exist online.
Fiction is the creation of a new world—the mind of the author opened in a way that can sustain visitors. Inviting them into your dream. You have to keep the walls of the dream up, lest reality bleed in and demolish the illusion. But the hyperlink need not be a conduit for destruction; it can also be a way to dramatically extend the dream walls, creating fictive worlds that feel larger than any yet created—maybe even as large as the world itself.
Like in the Borges fable where the map grows so large it becomes the terrain it describes, the novel may need to grow dramatically in size to capture our increasingly complex world successfully. It may need to look—and feel—like the worldwide web.
Note: the original version of this essay was originally published on Paragraph on March 15, 2025. You can read the original here, which includes discussions pulled from Farcaster.
The problem is, given the average attention span, it's unlikely the reader will return to the main narrative after clicking a hyperlink.
This is a fantastic article! I’m a horror/scifi/fantasy reader and writer, and using hyperlinks as worldbuildjng is something I never considered before! It’s such an intriguing idea. I’ll definitely consider using it in the future.